Dr. Frockrocket's
An Eclectic Ménage à Trois of Rock, Theatre, and Cabaret
AN INTERVIEW 
By Robert Becraft
Operatic lilts, glittery-jittery energy, bawdy witticism, faux-theology, and pushy audience interaction only begin to describe Dr. Frockrocket's Vivifying (Re-Animatronic) Menagerie and Medicine Show, a medicine show-cum-performance art extravaganza made up of West Coast femme-rockers, queer-punk activists, dancers, and poets.
Led by a group of iconic figures of Pacific Northwest independent music and feminist activism, some tied with Olympia, Washington's indy-label Chainsaw Records and Ladyfest 2000, the women's arts festival that spawned similar events in several cities, including Chicago. Medicine Show has packed venues in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and needless to say, Olympia. The cast list includes Jody Bleyle of "seminal queercore" band Team Dresch, who plays the protaganist Dr. Frockrocket, and Rachel Carns of off-kilter hardcore band The Need, who plays the organ.
Designed as a cabaret stage show in which actors test their own abilities, Medicine Show is a synchronized splurge of the many genres represented at Ladyfest. It is held together by the woeful story of Dr.Frockrocket, who invents a magical elixir which turns animals into mythological creatures: the show unfolds as the good doctor's menagerie grows increasingly wayward.
Activist and writer Nomy Lamm, Ms. 1997 Woman-of-the-Year, and one of Out magazine's "Out 100" for 2000, directed the Medicine Show. She also directed this email interview with three other core members: playwright Beth Stinson, production manager Spider, and performance artist/filmmaker Tara Jepsen.
RB: Why a rock opera now?
TARA: I don't really think of it as a rock opera. But maybe you're just saying, "why the rock and theater combo?" and my answer to that would be because it's the perfect marriage of our interests and talents and it's a fun medium to work in.
NOMY: I've always wanted to write musical theater. In the past few years I've finally found the community to be able to actually do things like write a rock opera or put together a musical performance art cabaret.
RB: At times theatre seems implicitly ludicrous. Can sincerity alone make a difference?
TARA: I love sincerity! I think sincerity can be a powerful thing to have out in the world, and I also think sincerity can be a close personal friend of the ludicrous. I think along with sincerity in our show there is an earnestness - a drive and desire to put something we believe in out there for people to digest. I'm a proponent of the idea that theater/art/ words CAN heal and transform, that people actually CAN go home feeling different or touched in however big or small a way. You can also go home feeling no different, but I think it's up to the person as well as the material [presented].
NOMY: Yes, I think that sincerity can make a HUGE difference. See that's the problem with traditional musical theater - it's not the least bit sincere. It's all about jazz hands and vibrato. Excruciatingly heterosexual love stories starring some of the the flamingest fags you ever saw. But I think that the medium has amazing potential. Music creates an emotional dynamic to a story, so when it IS coming from a place that is real and sincere, musical theater can be fucking powerful. It's funny that I'm writing this because I'm listening to the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack right now. Case in point.
BETH: Sincerity has not always been well received during the course of world theatre criticism/history. Form and technique has always been applauded albeit lacking substance and sensibility. We "organically" arrived in a vehicle for our desires and for where we are in our lives right now. To be honest, some of us don't know the whole picture about theatre, current or historical - we're making our own sense of it. Because of this we come to the ludicrous from a different angle. Having gone to school in theatre up to the MFA level, I personally had to make a life choice to either study the ludicrous the Ph.D. way or find a way to deconstruct it on a more personal level. I owe a lot to my comrades.
RB: How has the Menagerie Show been kept from turning into hogwash and show for the sake of re-presenting music?
NOMY: Oh ye of little faith, it's because the music was written as a way to tie together the various performance pieces, which focus on themes of healing and transformation. We built the show so that the pieces would support each other, we weren't trying to rely on a gimmick.
RB: The Menagerie Show seems to lack coherence in costumes and narrative. At the same time, it also lacks traditionally theatrical means of chaos: absurdist contraptions, antic costumes, tirades, non sequiturs, pretentious paddling. With plain English, base humor, (some scatological, some farcically sexual) and restless singsong, what's being aimed at?
TARA: I think Rachel described it best once as an exquisite corpse experiment. We got together and talked about themes and ideas we were interested in, then went off on our own to create pieces about them that would later be knit together by a sort of ringmaster. It invariably has to be a little disjointed, but I think it has a powerful undercurrent of psychic connection.
NOMY: Second that. Also, when you're performing in a show, you can't see what it's really gonna be until dress rehearsal, and even then you never get to see the finished product because you're onstage or backstage or distracted. ... We didn't have a director so there was nobody really keeping track of the big picture, shaping the show around a single vision. In a lot of cases that probably wouldn't work, but in our case I think it did.
RB: The show obviously has a remedial emphasis, but who gets treated for what?
BETH: Traditionally (ha), traveling medicine shows have presented a faux cure-all in a circus-like cabaret manner. We perform our feats under this guise, patents or not.
NOMY: We're all being "treated" for the ailments of numbness, apathy, consumerism, conformity; all those nasty by-products of late-stage media-dominated capitalism.
SPIDER: People get treated for what they wanna get treated for, what they're willing to get treated for, what they're open to.
RB: The show revolves around the transformation of the Menagerie from shackled chattels to mythical creatures of Dr. Frockrocket, from glib showman to reflective layman. All this is caused by a magical elixir. Does this narrative have symbolic significance?
NOMY: Of course it does. Dr. Frockrocket thinks he invented this product that makes people come alive and find magic in reality. He goes bonkers when he sees the true power of his menagerie: the animals start to become free, to transcend the hierarchical constructs of the medicine show, to feel and engage and react. He's forced to the question of whether his elixir is actually the source of this transformation, and if so, why he's unable to control it. He created the Menagerie and Medicine Show as a profit-making spectacle, but he underestimated the truth and pain and power that is the basis of real healing and transformation. And he can't deal with it. Luckily we take it easy on him and let him join in the fun at the end.
RB: Animals turning into mythical creatures because of an elixir may be confusing. After all, isn't an elixir supposed to transform or cure? Not deify? How is this puzzling logic important? Does it have meaning?
NOMY: It's the ultimate quick-fix cure-all: Buy my product and you will become that amazing, important, magical person you've always wanted to be. Isn't that what advertisements are trying to tell us, in some thinly veiled form or another? What's the difference between Elixir #11 and those "WOW!" bum-leaking fat-free-fat potato chips? We all have the potential to become our own mythological magical beings, and that transformation is a lot more emotionally and spiritually challenging than buying a bag of chips.
SPIDER: It takes deifying people, concepts, etc. for transformation to occur - you gotta make a choice, commit to some idea or feeling consciously or unconsciously so that you can get to the next place of having it all being blown to fuckin' pieces, and then go to the next place... until... ummm... you reach inner peace and enlightenment.
RB: Is interaction with the audience meant to condole and console? If so, for what reason?
NOMY: The audience is part of the performance. They are playing the role of consumers-in-need-of-a-cure. Frocky wants them to buy his product, but the real point of the show is that they don't need it. Playing with the audience helps clue them in to this dynamic.
SPIDER: Both I suppose. Interaction, implied or literal, always evokes some sort of reaction. I would just hope that we're an effective mirror.
RB: Above all, is comedy the biggest remedy used by the show?
BETH: One of them. I like it, it makes me thoroughly excited backstage.
NOMY: Maybe for you. I think it's different for everyone, different parts of the show speak to different people. There's a lot of comedy in the first half of the show that leads to some darker, more painful places towards the end. Honesty, fearlessness and vulnerability are some of the other "remedies."
SPIDER: I don't think so - it runs the gamut because nothing is that simple.
RB: The Menagerie Show is about the healing power of words. But suprisingly, it seems as if mimes and prattlers leave little room for language that makes sense. Is deconstructed language the most therapeudic?
NOMY: When we were first throwing around ideas for the show, we talked a lot about the legend of the Golem - a Jewish mythical creature modeled out of dirt and clay, brought to life through the utterance of sacred words. We were interested in the idea of magic words that create new realities. We really elaborated on these ideas in our emails to each other, but I think the way those concepts got worked into the show are a lot more subtle.
SPIDER: Well, it's jarring. Jarring forces transformation; reaction, fear, tears, rude objections. Considering the numbness surrounding audiences of media/art/external stimulation, whatever's gonna make you stop and think is therapeutic.
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